NRGI is proud to announce the arrival of Petronia, an interactive online course unlike any other in the resource governance field, where learners can “play” at influencing resource governance outcomes in a simulated context.

More than any other NRGI resource to date, Petronia makes learning about resource governance fun and interactive with dynamic animations and a close focus on learning through roleplaying and gamification. It is ideal for online learners with limited background in the field, but a desire to understand key issues.

The course explores the policy challenges in the Republic of Petronia, a fictional developing country that has made a potentially game-changing oil discovery. Learners join a team of experts deployed to advise the country’s policy-makers in a series of missions exploring different aspects of resource governance over time. Learners build their knowledge of the technical issues while developing an understanding of the different perspectives and complex trade-offs of managing resource wealth for development.

​Learners not only think and reflect about policy choices in Petronia, they can also “do” by consulting stakeholders, analyzing government and international data, and developing recommendations with their team. We hope this “serious gaming” aspect will appeal to both adult and youth learners alike.

Learners set their own pace and choose missions according to their interests in Petronia’s immersive reality, which draws from the best of NRGI’s learning tools, including case studies, modelling tools, plain-language policy explanations and data tools. This course requires English proficiency and takes between four and eight hours depending on reading commitment.

Guyana’s first and major oil deal, with ExxonMobil, produces results for the government which are outlier low, an OpenOil financial model reveals. Over the life of the project the government should expect to see from 52% to 54% of profits, compared to well over 60% in a cluster of comparable projects signed in other frontier countries.

The gap could cost the small South American country billions of dollars, as successful drilling continues apace in the Stabroek field, and recoverable reserves figures climb into the billions of barrels.

The relatively low performance of the Stabroek terms, first signed in 1999 and renegotiated in 2016, following the first significant discovery the previous year, holds under a wide variety of market and field size conditions.

​There is also a significant possibility, as reserves growth gathers pace, that Exxon and its partners Hess and Nexen could achieve “super profits”, rates of return of over 25% and edging considerably higher under certain conditions, as this profit map of the project shows.

The agreement has become controversial in Guyana in the past year or so and the contract was published by the government at the end of 2017 to allow public scrutiny. The financial model and this accompanying narrative are based on that contract, as well as public statements and media reports giving details of reserves, development lead time and costs.

Even under conservative assumptions, Stabroek will transform Guyana. Government revenues could hit a billion dollars a year by 2024 – more than the entire current government budget.

The 52% Average Effective Tax Rate (also known as “the government take”) is lower than a general rule of thumb of 60% to 80% government take in oil projects, and also from a range of frontier projects in Ghana, Senegal, Papua New Guinea, Mauritania and Guinea, which were comparable at the time of signature. A more detailed description of the comparison methodology is laid out in the Annex to the narrative report.

What is significant here is to understand the role reserves growth scenarios could play in increasing company rates of return. At the currently stated field size of 450 million barrels in Stabroek, for example, the company does not reach “super profits”, defined here as an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 25% or more, until a price point of $75 per barrel for oil. But this field size relates only to the first stage of development of the field now underway, with first oil anticipated for 2020. A second phase is now under active consideration by the companies, with a projected production plateau which could be twice as high as in the first phase. If the amount of oil produced rose only modestly, compared to Exxon’s declared reserves, to 750 million barrels, the superprofit level (25% IRR) could be reached at $50 per barrel – below today’s prices. At a billion barrels, that stage could be reached with prices in the $40s per barrel.

A second stage of the model will be published in the coming weeks, to incorporate feedback from interested parties, and quantify how revenue streams could play for both investors and the government under a modified fiscal regime.

Over the weekend of November 25-26, ONE had the unique privilege of partnering up with dozens of data scientists at DataKind UK's Autumn DataDive. After years of advocating with our partners for extractive companies to publish information about their payments to governments, we finally had a large set of data on these financial flows at a granular, project-by-project level. This data is important because it helps enable citizens to demand that their country's natural resource wealth goes towards things like education, health, infrastructure and poverty eradication.

Our challenge for the weekend was to dive into this new mandatory disclosure data, alongside voluntary payment data from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and answer a set of complex questions â with the help of our volunteer, expert data wranglers. This wouldn't have been possible without the heavy lifting of the data team from the Natural Resource Governance Institute, who have scraped thousands of pages of pdf documents to build a tidy data set of mandatory disclosure payment information. Part of our objective for the weekend was to put this groundbreaking data to use, and to explore ways of making it actionable for researchers and advocates.

The data set we analysed contained details on $292bn of payments made by 499 companies, related to projects located in 135 different countries. Most of the data is for payments made in 2015 and 2016, although a smaller number are for 2014 and 2017. $44bn (15%) of the payments reported were made to governments in Africa, with the majority to Angola ($17bn) and Nigeria ($15bn). The payments relate to approximately 3,400 different extractives projects around the world, although companies vary in how they define a "project". But this was just a snapshot â the data is regularly updated by NRGI as companies make more disclosures and as new PDFs are ingested.

DEBUNKING INDUSTRY CLAIMS WITH DATA

As we push for this data to be made available by all companies around the world, we often run into resistance and push-back from the oil, gas and mining industries. What we found in the data sheds new light on long-running debates.

One industry group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), has staunchly opposed efforts to require this payment information to be published in the US, in part because it claims that doing so would be too burdensome. But our volunteers found that several API member companies are already publishing this information in other jurisdictions. In fact, we found that API members â such as Shell, Chevron, BP, and others â have already disclosed at least $145 billion of payments to governments, many through subsidiaries. This represents nearly half of the total payments reported so far. That undermines the API'a assertions that publishing these reports under US law would be burdensome, since many are already doing it anyways as required by EU and Canadian laws.

Our analysis of the data also fully debunks another evidence-free claim advanced by the API, namely, that four countries (Angola, Cameroon, China, and Qatar) would prohibit them from disclosing payments and punish them if they did. Guess what? Five of the largest API members we identified in the data have collectively reported payments of nearly $20 billion to those countries, without experiencing any negative effects. The data undermines their claims that publishing this information was prohibited or would cause them harm.

Some opponents of this data also claim that publishing the information would put them at a competitive disadvantage to state-owned competitors, on the assumption that state-owned companies would not need to report their payments to their own or other governments. However, the data shows that this is simply not the case: state-owned companies account for 2 in 5 of the total payments reported to date. These include several large state-owned companies from countries like Russia (e.g. Gazprom and Rosneft) and China (e.g. CNOOC) that are hardly models of transparency, as well as Norway (Statoil). (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Many of the companies with the largest reported payments are state-owned.

VISUALISING PAYMENT FLOWS

A team of volunteers also set out to visualise the data in ways that would make it more actionable for activists and journalists. In doing this, we found that the mix of payment types varies widely across company and recipient government â and that there were differences in the mix of payments made to African governments vs. non-African governments.

One team focused on payments to Africa and visualised the payments from the top 20 companies in an interactive Sankey diagram (Figure 2). Doing so revealed that production entitlements were the largest payment type made by these companies to African governments, and that the majority of payments unsurprisingly went to Angola and Nigeria, the continent's two largest oil producing countries.

Figure 2: A Sankey diagram showing payments made to African governments from the 20 largest paying companies.

When we plotted the same companies' payments to governmentsoutsideof Africa, the picture looked different: taxes represent a larger share of the payment mix (see Figure 3). This reveals an interesting issue that merits further exploration. Production entitlements often flow to state-owned entities in the form of in-kind payments (e.g. barrels of oil). While this can be a legitimate arrangement, state-owned entities can be notoriously opaque, particularly in Africa, where several such companies have come under scrutiny in recent years for misplacing or mismanaging billions in revenues. The revelation that these types of payments are more extensively used in countries like Angola and Nigeria, where state-owned oil companies are particularly secretive and scandal-prone, highlights the importance of more closely examining these types of payments to ensure that they are handled appropriately.

Figure 3: A Sankey diagram that shows the same companies as the previous, but now reflecting the payments they made to governments outside of Africa.

Maps also featured at the Data Dive as the data experts attempted to link project-level data to individual concessions using OpenOil's Concession Map. In time, this could be a great way for activists to explore this new payment data. However, more work will be needed in cleaning the project names so that we can cleanly link them to individual concessions.

The volunteers also tried using machine learning techniques such as clustering to identify patterns in the types of payments that companies make to governments. Clear patterns emerged (see Figure 4), so we think that this approach could eventually become a tool to help researchers to spot "red flags" in the data.

Figure 4: An example of clustering analysis of the payments data.

IN-KIND PAYMENTS

Another team of volunteers worked with Alex Malden of NRGI to explore in-kind payments. This partially included the production entitlements described earlier, but also meant analysing the free-text notes and annotations that companies use to describe the payments data.

For example, ENI's 2016 Report on Payments to Governments shows taxes and royalties paid to Libya's National Oil Corporation (see Figure 5). Footnotes on these payments explain that at least part of these payments were made as direct transfers of oil instead of cash.

Over the weekend, volunteers developed a provisional methodology to flag line items in the data that refer to in-kind payments. Using this methodology,they estimated that roughly 20% of all payments reported in the mandatory disclosures are made in-kind. This equates to roughly $80 billion of value â a huge number that highlights the urgent need for more transparency on the volumes and transfer pricing of non-cash payments. We also found that the share of in-kind payments varied significantly from one receiving government to the next. Doing further work to perfect this methodology will allow investigators to target their investigations to the areas most susceptible to corruption.

LINKING THE DATA

While this new data tells us a great deal, we think its real potential will be realised when it is combined with other available data â such as data from the Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), commodity data, budget data, financial statements, corporate ownership data, contracts, and more. So part of our exploratory work at the Data Dive involved trying to build methodologies to link the information from the mandatory disclosures to these other data sources. This proved to be difficult, but in the process we learned a lot about the specific challenges we face and the next steps to overcome them as a community.

One team focused on the EITI data, with the aim of linking individual companies between it and the mandatory disclosures data. Why did we hone in on this data? In short, we think that finding a way to combine them could result in a more comprehensive picture of extractives payments. EITI member countries submit annual reports that detail the payments their governments receive from extractive companies. In essence, the information provided through this process is similar to what companies are supposed to report in the mandatory disclosures, particularly going forward since EITI countries will soon begin reporting project level data. But since neither EITI nor the mandatory disclosures are yet implemented globally, the two data sets each reflect a different, overlapping patchwork of countries and companies. Linking them together would enable us to compare two different accounts of the same underlying system.

âUsing text matching tools on company names, the team was able to find 35 companies from the mandatory disclosures in the EITI data. While this number was small, the matched companies accounted for over 40% of the total financial flows in the mandatory disclosures. These overlaps can now be analysed in further detail to check for validity and consistency.

But we also saw very clearly what we were missing: a tidy dataset of company ownership information. The entities reporting the mandatory disclosures were predominately large parent companies while the entities reported in the EITI data were usually smaller, local operating subsidiaries. We used text analysis of the company names to link some of these together, but we know this method left a lot of connections uncovered. The next step would be to locate information from the larger parent companies about their subsidiaries and build a comprehensive ownership dataset, which could then be used to decisively connect the two data sets. We look forward to continuing this work with OpenOwnership and the wider community of partners.

Linking companies solely through text matching proved to be a messy and time-consuming process. So a team also worked on connecting the EITI data to OpenCorporates, which maintains a vast data set of corporate entity information organised with unique corporate IDs. At first we were able to make exact matches on 230 names, which represented c.23% of the total flows reported in the EITI data. After a lot of cleaning and fuzzy matching the volunteers found matches for 600 names, which correspond to c.28% of the financial flows. We would love to share our code and learning from this work with others who are keen to help take it forward. This work also highlighted the value of Legal Entity Identifiers being incorporated in all company reporting, as our research would have been much easier if we could easily identify and link unique corporate entities.

WHAT'S NEXT

As a community, we are still at the beginning of a journey to maximise the potential of data about governments' natural resource revenues. But the DataDive was an energetic, whistle-stop tour of a groundbreaking data set: we left with a deeper understanding of what the data meant and feel inspired by the new questions and possibilities that volunteers unlocked. In coming weeks we will publish further detailed documentation of the work done at the dive, along with links to code. Please contact Kate Vang or Joseph Kraus with questions, contributions, or to discuss anything in more detail.

âAll of us at ONE give huge thanks to DataKind UK, to NRGI and to all of the DataDive volunteers. This project would not have been possible without the incredible volunteer Data Ambassadors: Victoria Bauer, Stephen Gaw and Nick Jewell. And a special thanks to the Elsevier Foundation and University College London for sponsoring the event.

Peru is right to be pursuing these unpaid taxes—but what if this is just the tip of the iceberg? GPC argues that they should be trying to recover more from the Cerro Verde mine. Their analysis shows that between 2006 and 2011 the mine failed to pay an additional $200 million in taxes. Cerro Verde, in their own financial statements, state that if they lose all the appeals they will owe $544 million in unpaid taxes between 2006 and 2013.

Further, between 2005 and 2012 (the “boom” years for mining companies around the world) GPC estimates that Cerro Verde generated upwards of $5 billion in tax credits, as a result of overly generous fiscal terms. And last year, a second major investment by Cerro Verde allowed copper production to further double (500,000 tons in 2016). This is a major concern for the tax justice groups in Peru. Basically, despite production increasing and commodity prices recovering, a second tax stabilization agreement signed in 2015 (allowing for accelerated capital depreciation) is likely to mean that Cerro Verde’s taxable income for the next few years is effectively zero.​These discretionary tax exemptions are already having a huge impact on budget transfers to Arequipa: since 2012, subnational transfers from mining have collapsed (from an average of 70 percent in 2012 to just 2 percent in 2016). GPC cautions that these revenues are unlikely to recover until 2019 or 2020, at the earliest.

In just the last two years Oxfam has commissioned similar case study research in Cambodia, Kenya, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Niger—which each map government risks to revenue. Understanding oil, gas, and mine economics at the individual project level allows us to understand how national tax policy, royalty policy, subsidies and other investment incentives affect the amount and timing of revenue being produced by extractives projects for government coffers – and then into investments that yield inclusive human development outcomes. For our partners and allies, it is at the project level where revenues are secured or lost and it is where the real transformative potential for those revenues to support pro-poor development outcomes rests – as opposed to “economic growth,” and its often false promises of sustainable and inclusive jobs, infrastructure, or voluntary corporate social responsibility commitments.

Like the Cerro Verde case, these case studies show how countries that are heavily dependent on minerals or hydrocarbons for government revenues lose taxes from a combination of poorly negotiated, overly generous, and secretive contracts, and weak fiscal regimes vulnerable to abuse. Unlike Peru, not all governments have the wherewithal to audit multinational mining companies, and stay the fight through years of appeals.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Despite the seemingly infinite ways large mining, oil, and gas companies can avoid paying taxes in countries where they work – as new research from PWYP Canada shows – the pathways are not unlimited. There are clear patterns and concrete legal, policy, and administrative solutions that can minimize these risks.

In Peru, for example, the government should:

Eliminate opportunities for governments and political figures to offer discretionary tax benefits;

Move to eliminate all unjustified tax benefits for the mining sector and move to a volume-based (rather than profit-based) royalty system; and

Strengthen its capacity to monitor and audit the fiscal agreements with mining and oil companies, and should ensure it has the full ability to track the quantity and value of minerals extracted from its lands.

Peru’s fight to recover lost revenues is not unique. Too often, countries with significant mineral, oil and gas resources fail to secure a fair share of the revenues generated by these projects. Such losses (which some global estimates put in the billions) are, quite simply, a matter of life or death. The lost billions represent money that should have been spent on building schools and hospitals, paying teachers, doctors and nurses, and providing equal access to safe drinking water or health care, among other urgent development priorities.

For more than ten years, Oxfam has fought for law and policy reform to require public disclosure of project-by-project payments, contracts, and beneficial ownership. We continue to defend anti-corruption laws like Section 1504 of Dodd-Frank and are now seeing a flood of new disclosures from laws in the EU and Canada. These long fought for gains are now allowing us to better understand how individual mining, oil, and gas project revenues are lost and we are ramping up our campaigns to stop them.

Scott Sellwood is a Program Advisor for Extractive Industries at Oxfam America.